Literature as an industry

I've been thinking about the last line in the essay below: "In the age of BookScan, only an unpublished writer is allowed to keep his dignity." 


This is not quite true. For example, one can embrace print-on-demand technology as I have done, either with my own imprint (Sextant Books) or finding a POD publisher who responds to my work (Round Bend Press), publish and do little or no marketing at all. (I've done more with Round Bend than with my own imprint, figuring I need to help the publisher out). One doesn't sell many books doing this but if selling books is not the point, no matter. And at this late stage of career, it isn't.


But I worry about how POD technology affects the young writer. It's too easy, young, to be blind to one's faults. POD is really made for old farts with a history. I had my 10 or 15 years in the sun and don't have to prove anything to anyone. When I need is for my work to be available, and it is now in two archives, one digital, the other hard copy, at two universities. This is about as much "security" and posthumous existence as a "marginal writer" like myself can hope for. No complaints.


But I still advise young writers to play by traditional rules and learn in the school of hard knocks. This advice would be irrelevant to a literary genius, and I'm sure a few are lurking around in dark hidden corners of cyberspace, to be discovered at a distant date. But today it's too easy to make mediocre work seem important. To give mediocre work a lot of visibility. All one has to do is turn to a classic, the way I've turned to Dos Passos lately, to experience the difference between great and mediocre work, and the vast majority of things published now and in all ages is mediocre. What I and every serious writer strives to do is to rise above this.


I had no sense starting out that literature was "an industry." I thought of it as a cultural precious stone, a gem, to be nourished, protected, extended. The literary novel, so called with respect half a century ago, was not supposed to sell a lot of copies. Repeat, it was not published to sell a lot of copies! What a concept. This is a horrible business principle, which is why it was changed once genuine businessmen took over the publishing industry. These books were published because that's how a publisher made a reputation and participated in the cultural dance of respect for literature.


I think literature is still out there, the tough serious books that last forever because they speak to elements of the human condition that never vanish. Even Moby Dick was a monumental failure in its day. Some young writer, some genius, is writing remarkable things and sticking it online. I'd bet on it. Where is it? Who the hell knows. Among the hundreds of thousands, millions, of such ebooks. What we need at this time and place are a few bright critics who can filter through all this mediocre work and find the true gems. Critics may be more important than writers today for the survival of the literary culture.


In the meantime, writers, literary or not, have become hucksters if they want to be visible and possibly successful. It's too bad. Old writers like myself are damn lucky. We paid our dues before the bottom liners took over the literature industry.